This April Asymptote gets topical: notable scholar Susan Bassnett tells us what the rhetoric in Libya has to do with translation; our own Sayuri Okamoto gives us a despatch from Japan, one month after the tsunami of 11 March. In Drama, Han Lao Da eerily reminds us that "water is stronger than the heart full of hatred"; Anthony Luebbert's essay on A.R. Luria, however, places more faith in forgetting. For Reina María Rodríguez, who gives us a memoir from Cuba, forgetting is precisely what is being resisted. In other despatches, migrant workers Xiao Yuan and Loida Arevalo present the flipside of the official narrative, just as Yevgeniy Fik's photos of gay cruising sites uncover an alternate Moscow.

As suggested by our cover by guest artist Kazunari Negishi, this is also an issue of counterpoints. While Imre Kertész, for example, describes the estrangement from the man in the street experienced by artists, the videos of Chia-En Jao expose the estrangement from artists experienced by the man in the street. Childhood, so free and idyllic in José Saramago's Small Memories, morphs into tortured adolescence in Jean-Christophe Valtat's 03, whose unnamed protagonist "suffers an impossible love for the girl waiting at the bus stop on the opposite side of the street". Although desire is also acute to the point of painful in Ingrid Winterbach's The Book of Happenstance, it is playful and diffuse in Dominic Pettman's In Divisible Cities. Translated also into the Italian just for us by Damiano Abeni and Moira Egan, the experimental piece leads off our Encounters with Languages special feature with Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé's irresistible blend of theory and pop. Displacement is the name of the game after that: a story about Americans in India is set next to one about Indians in America, then a tale about Chinese diaspora in America next to an anecdote of travel in China. I hope you enjoy our switcheroos.